Make a Difference : How One Man... | Buy

Chapter One

Getting Involved

Traveler, there is no path; paths are made by walking.

--Spanish saying

It was a cold, gray Chicago afternoon and I was headed to a meeting way down on the South Side in an area that clearly made my white cab driver uncomfortable. "Are you sure you know where you are going?" he said, observing my white face and middle-class attire. I had learned some time ago from my African-American friends that it wasn't wise to drive my Mercedes in the Grand Boulevard area because that car was much too inviting when stopped for a red light or a stop sign in front of clusters of young men loitering on the street corners. Once, when visiting a welfare office in Chicago's Austin community on the West Side, I walked the one short block to the CTA train, and a young black man raced across the street and grabbed my arm shouting, "Hey, white man, what are you doing down here? You're afraid of me, aren't you?" There was some combination of hatred and mocking in his eyes. Knowing the knives and other weapons that he and his friends surely possessed, I was definitely afraid. I remembered a friend of mine who was mugged and his arm slashed, cutting a nerve that caused him to lose the use of his thumb and fingers. I kept walking briskly, then sprinted up the stairs to the elevated train. It's hard to come to grips with the fact that a large number of people who don't even know you deeply resent you because of the color of your skin--and the privileges that color is thought to, and most assuredly does, bring with it.

This time I was headed for an afternoon discussion with a group of African-American women that the Reverend B. Herbert Martin and I came to call "the ladies in the backyard." I would be meeting with Maxine, a dour twenty-year-old felon and mother recently released from prison, and Lavon, a vivacious midtwenties mother and prostitute, among others. The Reverend Martin, a smart, handsome, charming man in his forties, had become a friend in the course of my work on the state's convoluted and problematic human services systems, and he was an important, though sometimes controversial, leader in Chicago's large African-American community. He became pastor of his church, Progressive Community, when it had only forty-two members, and in a dozen years had built it into a vibrant institution of over two thousand parishioners engaged in a wide range of activities, largely centered on outreach to the poverty-stricken Grand Boulevard community. His charisma was electric, and attending a service at Progressive is an unforgettable experience. B. Herbert, as he is often called, counted among his parishioners the legendary Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor--a man whose picture and memory are still omnipresent in Chicago's black community more than a dozen years after his death.

My wife, Charlene, and I found his Sunday services inspirational and fascinating. At our first visit there, our white skins made us feel somewhat self-conscious, but the friendliness of the parishioners and the incredibly beautiful gospel singing of the huge choir soon dissipated our anxiety. The music soared in a very exciting way, and the end of each piece was followed by heartfelt exclamations of "Thank you, Lord!" from all parts of the congregation. I learned that this is part of the "talk-back" or "call and response" African-American religious tradition that enriches the service from beginning to end, finding its roots in the Deep South. We couldn't help but be swept up in the spiritual electricity and the deep devotion that filled the lively church.

The Reverend Martin's preaching made full use of the long pause, always stimulating responses ranging from the grateful "Amen!" to "Hallelujah, praise the Lord!" There was a musicality to his homilies, which often addressed the problems of race, overcoming great obstacles, and the importance of family. Although I didn't agree with everything he said, this church was clearly an oasis of hope and values at Ground Zero in the struggle against poverty and crime. Like many inner-city church leaders, B. Herbert ran a regular food pantry and countless other programs serving the community--without any government money. The congregation consisted predominantly of women and younger children, a large number of them dressed beautifully in white, with white hats and white gloves. The few men present were usually honored with leadership roles, in part, I suspect, to encourage their attendance. The Reverend Martin always sought out good male role models to strengthen the congregation. The services were long--one Palm Sunday service we attended lasted from 10:30 A.M. to 2:00 P.M.! When we asked B. Herbert about the length of the service, he said, "We are providing therapy to people who can't afford therapists--and look at what they have to go back to when they leave the service."

Several weeks before this afternoon's scheduled meeting, I got a call from B. Herbert asking to get together. We ended up agreeing to meet for breakfast at his apartment on Grand Boulevard. The apartment building was rehabbed public housing, and he was the only male tenant, living there with his teenage son and daughter. He greeted me at the door on the third floor of the walk-up and ushered me in to a small but comfortable apartment where a lavish breakfast was laid out on the kitchen table. Southern food traditions show up everywhere in Chicago's black community, and the dizzying variety and heaping portions are hallmarks of this folk cuisine. When we sat down I eagerly picked up a fork, but he paused and announced that it was my turn to say grace. I apologized, mumbling something about the food looking so good that I had inexcusably overlooked grace. Saying grace one-on-one with a man whose prayerful oratory is beyond eloquent made me a little nervous, but I think I did a passable job.

After some interesting small talk, he got to the point. "Gary, you are the only white guy I've seen in the twenty-five years I've been here who has come to this area to help and who has stayed with it to really make a difference. We've seen well-meaning white people `parachute in,' as we say, bringing an idea and good intentions. But they tend to disappear in reasonably short order. As you well know, Grand Boulevard is a very tough situation, and I don't want you to be disappointed. You and the governor need to really understand, at the grass roots, what you are up against."

He went on to tell me about a group of women who gathered most afternoons in the small backyard of his apartment building. He told of their drinking, swearing, and how they often shared their monthly welfare checks with their boyfriends. "The bottom line," he said, "is unless we can reach this group and do things that will result in a change in their behavior, we won't have succeeded in our reform efforts. You can change how the state does things and how it is organized, you can support the formation and operation of community groups, but until the ladies in the backyard change their behavior, you will not have success." I knew he was right. A rough analogy from my business world was the need to really get to know the customer. He ended by saying: "Gary, you are a great guy, I know you care a lot, but I don't want you to get hurt. You know this community and the human services systems well, probably better than any white guy I've ever met, but you may still be naive about what's going on here and how tough the challenge really is."

I was easily persuaded that there was much more to learn, and I was very happy when he agreed to attempt to arrange a meeting for me with the ladies in the backyard. He said it wouldn't be easy, given their natural suspicion of white people and people representing government. We would have to lean heavily on his credibility and persuade them that talking openly with me might do them some good and wouldn't come back to hurt them. Trust would have to be developed. My credentials for sitting with these ladies and having an open exchange must have seemed incredibly suspect. They might also wonder: why would I want to spend time like this? Meeting with the ladies in the backyard was another milestone in a journey that, much of it developing unconsciously, pointed inexorably to an intense commitment to do whatever I could to make a difference by helping to solve our country's welfare/poverty problem.

I had been the chairman of the Governor's Task Force on Human Services Reform for the state of Illinois since February 1993. For most of my career I was a businessman--a partner in McKinsey & Co., a large international management consulting firm, and CEO of Mark Controls Corporation, a company I built up from a small, marginal, money-losing valve manufacturing company into a Fortune 1000 electronic and process controls company. In 1987, the various divisions of Mark Controls were, in total, worth almost three times what the company's stock sold for on the New York Stock Exchange. I decided I should break it up by selling the pieces before some Wall Street raider decided to do it for me--our longtime investors deserved those gains. A Chicago Tribune headline said, "Firm Beating Raiders to the Punch, CEO Manages Himself Out of a Job." The overall strategy worked well, with the stock becoming worth $160 per share, compared with $10 per share when I became CEO. After selling the major units, I turned the remainder over to a longtime partner and went trekking in Nepal by myself in an effort to think through my future. I was on a number of corporate, venture capital, and foundation boards. A special interest, though only part-time, was the United Parcel Service board of directors, which I had joined on the recommendation of some McKinsey friends. The company has wonderful people and a legendary culture, and was in the process of rolling its service across the country, around the world, and into the air. These activities were very stimulating, but something was missing, and I felt a need for a core activity that was quite different from my business activities.

When my two sons, my best friends, went away to school, I moved from our small farm to an apartment in Chicago and also bought a small apartment in New York for business convenience and to pursue my passion for the theater and other arts. My first wife, with an affinity for the wilderness and an intense dislike of cities, went off to Wyoming. Over the years we had developed and changed quite differently, and I was single for the first time in many years. This arduous adventure in Nepal seemed like a good way to survey the possibilities of how my life might unspool from that point forward.

Trekking for days, purposely without reading material, and accompanied by a Sherpa, a porter, a cook, a yakateer (a young fellow with a firm stick who keeps the yaks moving), and two yaks laden with our small tents, food, and cooking gear, we were a quiet, purposeful group. The entire menagerie cost $25 per day, apparently attractive work in a country where the average income is $160 per year. My companions spoke Nepali only, with the exception of the Sherpa, whose limited English restricted conversation to primitive operational details. I was on a verbal fast--thinking was the only available activity besides walking. We marched on for days in silence--quite remarkable for someone as naturally loquacious as I am. I was determined to see Mount Everest, the highest spot on the face of the earth, with my own eyes, but more important, to think clearly about what to do with my life.

I was extremely fortunate to be financially secure at age fifty-one, and to have many options. I really didn't have to do anything. However, though I always enjoy traveling to an interesting spot in the world, or playing tennis at a resort, I'm soon anxious to get back and do something that I think is meaningful. My sons tease me because I can usually be counted on to judge activities on the basis of whether or not they will have some kind of "impact" on the world. A director and member of the search committee of Conrail had asked me to consider becoming Conrail's chairman and chief executive officer, a former Illinois governor had asked me to consider being the Republican nominee for the upcoming U.S. Senate race, venture capital firms had expressed interest in my becoming a partner, and there was the prospect of buying a company and starting anew.

To me, there has always been something spiritual about tall, beautiful mountains, compelling the soul to look upwards, leading to a higher level of consciousness. Years earlier I had climbed the Matter-horn and the Grand Teton, experiencing intimately the beauty and magnetism of the Alps and the Rockies, but to me the Himalayas were more awesome, more beautiful, and more mysterious. Looking down, the "usual" sights were magical endless vistas, dotted with tiny villages. Buddhist prayer flags and a prayer wheel could be seen in each village, proclaiming hope, I thought. Looking ahead, above the next segment of trail, was always another jagged, steep mountain pass, often enticingly wreathed in a wispy fog.

In such an incredibly beautiful setting, it was natural to think about the big questions: why am I here on this earth? How much of my good fortune was the result of decades of hard work, and how much was just plain luck? How am I different now than when I cleaned gas station restrooms for $1 an hour, or when I graduated from business school in debt? What am I good at, and what are my weaknesses? Whose lives do I most admire? Where does God fit into all of this? What makes me happy?

Several thoughts emerged. Yes, I worked hard, but without overwhelming good fortune, I could have been one of the illiterate Nepalese struggling at least as hard for mere survival in a remote mountain village. Instead, I was born in the greatest country in the world, white, male, and with some abilities in math and conceptual thinking. I was born on the South Side of Chicago but for Depression-related job reasons, my family moved to New Jersey when I was four. My parents were not college graduates, and though not poor, I was aware that we lived on the south side of the tracks in the then-small New Jersey town of Westfield, and the kids whose families belonged to the country club lived in bigger houses on the north side. Getting to swim in a pool, instead of using yard sprinklers, was an exciting event. It happened once or twice a summer when I was invited by a school friend to join him at the country club. My friends and I played baseball and football in the street almost every day after school and in the summers. I was sure there wasn't enough money for college, so I worked hard to get admitted to the Naval Academy.

When I was fifteen, my stepfather was transferred to California as plant manager of a paint factory, and I ended up going to engineering school at UCLA, where the tuition was a bargain at $48 a semester. I won a navy scholarship and worked as a stress analyst in an aircraft company to pay for living expenses. The scholarship was for any of fifty top schools, including the Ivy League, but I was only dimly aware of what the Ivy League was. In any event, I knew I couldn't afford to travel to the East. Why engineering? Though I had never even met an engineer and had little idea what they did, somewhere along the way I had developed the impression that if a person was good at math, engineering could be a route to a decent middle-class living. However, I found working part-time in college as a stress analyst "B" calculating airplane safety factors for Douglas Aircraft very tedious. Fortunately, a chance meeting with a banker led me to an awareness of graduate business schools that, to my great surprise, would accept engineers with no business training. I pursued this thread, and it dramatically changed my life, opening doors I didn't even know existed. The chanciness of these life choices and their profound implications have stayed with me over the years. What about a person from neighborhoods where not only is advice on college unavailable, but where no one in the family, building, or neighborhood even works .

When the rest of my family was transferred from California to Florida in 1955, I remember visiting Florida on a school break and seeing separate department store drinking fountains marked "white" and "colored." This made no sense to me at all, so I took great pleasure, one hot day, in switching the signs and watching everybody dutifully drinking from the "wrong" fountain. Suppose I had been born black, I thought. Clearly, I would not have been accepted in my fraternity, much less elected its president--a credential that helped me to be the only UCLA graduate admitted to my class at Harvard Business School. By the way, there were about ten women, all with specialized training, in my seven hundred-student business school class. There was only one African American, a man. My skin color, my ability to do well in math, my gender, those chance fragments of career advice--what luck! These issues did not come up in our family; in fact, to the extent they did come up, it was clear that my stepfather, who married my mother when I was four, was a racist. Though discussions of race didn't come up much since we were in an almost all-white town, occasional remarks about "colored people" let me know he thought that as a race they weren't as good as we were. Why was I sensitive to these fairness issues? Was it genetic in the same way some people seem naturally gregarious from an early age, while others are more reticent? Was it some sort of need to be different from my parents--to be better?

By the time I embarked on my Nepal trip, I had developed the rudiments of a political philosophy. From the navy I had learned of the incredible waste that occurs in large bureaucracies, and from my business experiences I came to appreciate the value of entrepreneurism, tenacity, hard work, and having a mentor. Lots of people with more initial advantages than I had not done as well, either personally or professionally. To me, this all added up to everyone deserving a reasonable chance, call it a "ladder of opportunity." But it is up to the individual to climb it. Life will never be completely fair, but it does make sense to try and level the playing field--not the final score.

Though not usually described this way in the press, I believe conservatives and liberals share the belief that it is not fair for children to start out life with bullets whizzing by on the way home from school, or to go to schools that don't teach the basics. It's also very tough to grow up with no productive role models--middle-class blacks have long since left the bullets and bad schools for the increasingly integrated suburbs. Rank-and-file conservatives tend to be underrepresented in the media and in academia and, with some exceptions, not very involved in the national debate. This, and their natural skepticism about bureaucracies, politicians, and the effectiveness of government programs leaves conservatives vulnerable to charges of not caring about the less fortunate. Extremists on both sides (liberals and conservatives are each saddled with a Jesse) help keep simplistic labeling of conservatives like me alive.

I'm unlikely to forget a benefit dinner for Voices for Illinois Children, an Illinois advocacy organization, where, seated at the prime table with the executive director and the guest of honor, I listened to speech after speech bashing Republicans and accusing them of not caring about children. I suppressed a strong urge to leap up and say, "We Republicans have children and love them very much. Because we know that birth circumstances are often very unfair, we help lots of nonprofit organizations and foundations that help others. Everyone deserves a good chance to help himself or herself, and many people do not get one. But we believe government has a job to do to demonstrate positive outcomes from the myriad of existing programs now spending billions without much to show for it, before we commit more taxpayer dollars." Some unthinking conservatives do believe that lack of character is the main reason people are on welfare, and some liberals don't look to character at all--thinking of all people on welfare as victims. Both views are, of course, narrow and wrong in most (but not all) cases, reflecting an intuitive lack of understanding of the much more complex reality.

During the many hours of climbing the trails up the Himalayas, my mentor and role model, Harvey Branigar, kept coming to mind. Harvey was about twenty-five years older than I, about the same age as both my father, whom I never saw, and my stepfather. I had spoken with Harvey, a former business partner and devout Christian Scientist, at least once a week on the phone for over twenty years. Harvey had taken over his father's bankrupt real estate company during the Depression, building it up into a major, high-quality development company. He sold the Branigar Organization for many millions when he was in his sixties, but stayed involved with other investments he had made, including my company, Mark Controls Corporation. He and his investment group gave me the opportunity to be the CEO of Mark Controls when I was thirty-three, despite my having had no corporate management experience. I had joined McKinsey & Co. right out of business school, and was doing well as a partner. However, after six years of consulting, the chance to have direct line responsibility was enticing. When we first met we had immediate mutual trust, the kind of chemistry that rarely occurs. This led to a wonderful yet stress-tested relationship that survived two periods of near bankruptcy but ended with a sixteenfold increase in the value of Mark Controls stock.

During the rough times, Harvey was always there: "If anyone can do it, you can," he would say one way or the other. Because I sensed that he meant it, and because I didn't want to let him down, this was a powerful message. He had a marvelous ability to inspire, to create in people the ability to see themselves at their full potential. Among many other roles, Harvey was always pushing me to not be too busy to develop my spiritual life. I remember when I was in grade school, my stepfather dropping me off at the local Episcopal church to sing in the choir. This was a remedial effort, since I had received a very poor grade in music in fourth grade. Sitting and singing through the services, I picked up some appreciation for what church was all about, but it never really took hold. For a long time I thought myself too busy running my international company and spending time with my two young sons, Gary and Mike, on their activities and other family activities to have time to get involved. Sunday morning was my only "free" time. Besides, I thought, I was doing a pretty good job following the Bible's teachings without the necessity of going to formal meetings. Perhaps sensing a lack in me, and once commenting tactfully on the lack of religious preparation given to Gary and Mike, Harvey suggested that I needed more, and he was right. I went back to church in 1985, after a thirty-five-year absence, and started to appreciate the importance and value to me of faith.

Harvey, though somewhat shy, was made of steel when it came to his unwavering personal convictions about right and wrong. He was just under six feet tall, of medium build, and with piercing but friendly bluest-of-blue eyes. His handsome, rugged face was usually deeply tanned from riding his favorite horse out on his Arizona ranch. When he talked with you, his head would be cocked and his eyes would sparkle in a quizzical way that expressed curiosity and real interest in what you were saying. He listened to every word. He could look through you, but his manner was so diffident that there was never any feeling of being threatened. He regarded humility as a great strength. Those of us who knew him well would compare notes on our efforts to get him to walk through a door before we did since he was invariably holding it for others. When Mark Controls Corporation grew and I was becoming successful and getting media attention, I received a carefully crafted letter from him warning me that humbleness was an asset more important than the visible trappings of success that were coming my way. I wasn't sure whether he had noticed signs of arrogant behavior or just felt it was a risk that came with success. I felt terrible that I might be letting him down, and made sure that I did not.

Harvey's caring for people came through in everything he did. He was a director of Mark Controls, and after the first few years we had an annual ritual: he would offer to retire and I would insist that he stay. I would then persuade him to give a talk at our annual management conference, when our one hundred top managers would assemble from around the world. In a featured talk at the conference, Harvey would tell stories about people, especially those in the factories, and their importance to our success. One poignant story about an after-hours farewell talk he had with an elderly, heavyset African-American cleaning woman at his real estate company brought some of us to tears. Harvey was retiring, and she wanted to (and did) hug him for taking a personal interest in her and her family, and for his kindness. He told the story in his usual, extremely modest way, explaining that his interest in and helpfulness to her was just the normal response of one human being to another, but it doesn't happen as often as it should. The younger Mark Controls managers, seeing a highly successful (and, of course, quite wealthy) entrepreneur in front of them placing people values at the top of the list was a powerful message. Get good people, inculcate those people with values, and you will be successful personally (most important) as well as professionally.

Harvey put most of his money in a foundation to provide scholarships for the disadvantaged--dealing personally with each individual. He would get letters from far and wide, and read most of them personally. In choosing recipients, he would look primarily for qualities of character, especially determination, as well as degree of hardship. Though possessed of incredibly good instincts and judgment, he didn't consider himself smart or particularly good with numbers. His scholarship selections favored tenacity and tough circumstances over test scores, and many lives were dramatically changed by his generosity. Every so often, I would get an envelope full of letters he found particularly interesting. Since he maintained correspondence with his recipients during and after the scholarship, the impact on people's lives could be felt. A mother of two who had spent time in prison before matriculating, with Harvey's help, at MIT was one I remember quite well. Trekking in the Himalayas provided great inspiration and space for reflections, and Harvey kept appearing in my thoughts.

As I trekked across the Himalayas I also often found myself thinking about God. Looking out at the incomparable vistas, and at the staggering image of Mount Everest, the case for His existence was overwhelming. What I was seeing with my own eyes each day transcended what most of us can even imagine. I reflected on what I read about top men of science returning to church and their explanations of how their scientific knowledge moved them toward belief in God, not away from it. I had made my own important leap of faith a few years ago, when Harvey inspired my return as a regular churchgoer. I usually found the once-a-week opportunity to listen to a story from the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Gospel very interesting and often helpful to me in my daily life. The discipline of sitting still and listening to the larger thoughts of life for an hour and a half most weeks was clearly helping to change me, moving me more outside myself. This preparation gave me a base to draw upon as the seemingly endless hours and days went by in Nepal. My trek was strengthening my belief that God is working in all of our lives. The phrase "we are all God's children" kept coming to mind as I wound my way up into these amazing mountains, passing incredibly poor Nepalese villages. The average per capita income in Nepal is less than 50 cents a day ! This connected in my mind to the Canadian nurse who sat next to me on the flight from New Delhi into Katmandu who, turned down in her efforts to adopt a child in her own country because she was single, had arranged to come up into one of the villages to "arrange for the adoption," in effect, to purchase, a child from a poor Nepalese family. Imagine!

These larger thoughts came together with some others: the remembrance of the shock I experienced as a young naval officer when I volunteered to deliver a Christmas basket to a family in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina, and saw the pitiful living conditions--three beds in the one room, rickety stairs, no screens, a broken-down stove, and ragged, unhappy-looking people. I remembered my outrage at the segregated restrooms on the U.S. Naval base in Charleston, and the threatening response from the local congressman, L. Mendel Rivers, to my letter to him alerting him to this immoral and illegal condition. Congressman Rivers wrote me an angry response saying that if I had a problem with "alleged discrimination" I should write President Kennedy. At age twenty-three, I was jarred to learn that not only wasn't the congressman interested in ensuring that the law against discrimination on government bases was being carried out, but the thought crossed my mind that, as the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, his anger could show up in the form of a letter to the Pentagon delaying my scheduled release from the navy the following June. Later, I came to learn it was Mendel Rivers who caused most of those ships to be based in Charleston in the first place. If a powerful national leader with tremendous influence over our armed forces took this kind of position about segregated restrooms, what kind of influence must he have in other areas, such as employment and housing?

While in the Himalayas I also thought back on my embarrassment during a trip to Moscow in the Iron Curtain days when, on Moscow television, I saw homeless Americans sleeping in doorways in the inner city. The gist of the message was, "This is capitalism--you don't want it." I was affected by that message, because I didn't want the "Evil Empire" to have any rationale, and I was worried that the Soviets might have had a point. I came to believe that the message worked quite well, as subsequent conversations with educated Eastern Europeans, after the wall came down, revealed a genuine fear of capitalism that clouded their embrace of freedom. They wondered if they might be sleeping in doorways, without a caring "Big Brother" to plan their lives.

Now that the "Evil Empire" is gone there is an arguably more important need to show the world that the United States, as the paramount example of a free society, can have something approaching a level playing field for all of its citizens. A crass, but to me meaningful, rough test of success as a society would be to be able to walk by someone asking for a handout, knowing that the odds are overwhelming that the person has a decent "ladder of opportunity" to climb, and refuse to contribute. That is the tough love needed to push him or her to take advantage of the opportunity that awaits. Without really being conscious of it, I had been developing a personal philosophy about disadvantaged people over a number of years, and trekking in Nepal gave me the opportunity to start pulling the various threads together.

I had always taken great pride in the organizations that were an important part of my life (UCLA, Harvard, Mark Controls, UPS, McKinsey, and the navy) and I wanted to be just as proud of my country. Clearly, some things had to be fixed if I was going to be as proud of my country as I would like to be. We Americans had things right for 90 percent of our people, but we had some tough work to do to level the playing field for the remaining 10 percent. What could I do? I began with a self-assessment. I'm good at large-scale organization change. I enjoy people of all types--from cab drivers to factory workers to professors. I'm good at picturing how things ought to be--and how to get there.

I also knew I had an acute need for the intellectual stimulation of taking on new challenges--especially something that no one had done before. Undergirding the intellectual aspect of my Nepal thinking was my longtime service on the board of trustees of the Russell Sage Foundation, the largest foundation in the country devoted solely to social science research. At the time of my Nepal trip, I was chairman of the board, and because of economic globalization and other trends, we had steered the foundation to a primary focus on poverty research. We met with and supported most of the leading poverty researchers in the country, and I had learned a lot in the process.

I remember vividly a Russell Sage trustees' weekend retreat at the famous Meyer mansion, now a conference center, in Seven Springs, New York. Mr. Meyer was the owner of the Washington Post among other properties, and his daughter, Katherine Graham, the current publisher of the Post , grew up in the sylvan surroundings. As an odd contrast, the focus of the retreat was poverty, and we were joined by half a dozen leading poverty research grantees.

I had recently experienced a day teaching remedial algebra and meeting with students at the Lucy Flower Vocational High School in Chicago's inner city. Lucy Flower was one of those high schools where the dropout rate and pregnancy rate were both about 50 percent and the average ACT score was 8, the lowest in the entire city and less than half the score needed to get into an average college. I arrived the day after an incident in the schoolyard where a student had brought a loaded gun to school and had been threatening other children. Lucy Flower is an all black school, and a bitter white teacher who seemed to be counting her days to retirement escorted me around. When we arrived in the cafeteria it was quite rowdy, much like my memory of lunch period at my own high school. She turned to me and said, in all seriousness, "The only real answer to all of this is castration." Unbelievable, I thought--their teacher! The rest of the day was filled with stunning revelations--a code in each teacher's record book showing mental and physical disabilities and other problems diagnosed for each child, with more than half the children on each roster marked with one or more of these problems; the locked computer room full of computers donated by a manufacturer, idle due to lack of connecting cables and qualified teachers; the incredible noise level in each classroom, including the one I tried to teach; teachers in the faculty lunchroom telling of visits from the downtown bureaucracy where inspector/observers came to the school briefly, disappeared, and then filed reports that showed no understanding of the situation whatsoever; paint peeling off the walls and ceilings; and, finally, the principal who, I was told, spent much of her time in her office watching television. At one point I asked the kids what they would do if they were the principal. They said, among other things, "paint the classroom." By this time I really wanted to help, and turning to the teacher I said, "I'll buy the paint. Why don't we come in on Saturday and paint the classroom?" After discussion with the teachers I was told it wouldn't be possible--security would be required, we'd have to pay overtime to open the door for the building engineer who reported to his own separate downtown bureaucracy, and we'd have union problems for doing work normally done by unionized workers. It appeared that the actual work of painting would be a small fraction of the total time and expense required to make this simple idea happen. I was beginning to understand why it is so hard to fix a big city school system. In the meantime I found out that the very good Catholic schools in Chicago were shrinking in size due to lack of students, with tuition levels at about one-third the per capita cost of the public schools. But school choice is another complex subject for someone else's book.

(Continues...)